TSN flashed its projection for the Canadian Olympic roster last night, and while there are players to complain about, as always, when you're stacking 30 capable players onto a 23-man roster, there's going to be disagreement. You can quibble with Patrice Bergeron being off the team in favour of Jeff Carter, quibble with Martin St. Louis not making the cut, or quibble with the logic that Chris Kunitz is the only left winger in the world that plays well next to Sidney Crosby.

But the defence is where I have the biggest issue. Currently, TSN has P.K. Subban, the reigning Norris Trophy winner, on the team's "fifth pairing", effectively as a bubble player. Why?

no other defenceman in the league brings quite the same combination of edge-of-the-seat offensive dynamism, punishing physicality and defensive smarts – the closest analogue is like L.A. Kings’ defenceman Drew Doughty (who signed an eight-year, $56-million contract before the last lockout, which averages to $7- million per season).

One of the traps hockey people get into when they evaluate defensive play, is that often "lack of offence" is conflated with "good defence". "Good defence", in actuality, is the prevention of a scoring chance or a goal against, so it's effectively something that never happened. The problem with Subban is that the edge-of-the-seat offensive dynamism to what Gordon refers to is actually what keeps people from thinking that Subban is an elite defender.

The thing is, the record shows that opponents don't often generate a lot against him when Subban is playing.

Worth noting this isn't a rating on the best defencemen in the NHL. It's simply a record of which defencemen were on the ice for the fewest shots against. Only three New Jersey Devils, and a sheltered fifth defenceman for one of the NHL's best puck-possession teams, managed to prevent fewer shots than Subban did.

Sure, there are probably some defencemen that are better than Subban at preventing shots once you adjust for quality of forwards faced and all that fun stuff, but Subban's offensive game can be described not only as electrifying, but overwhelming as well. He's third in the NHL in points among defencemen since the start of the 2011-2012 campaign, behind a Swedish and American defenceman.

You'd expect a Norris Trophy to make most of the players around him better. The Habs Corsi Close % last year was 54.7%, good for 7th in the NHL. Take out Subban, who was on the ice for 34.3% of the shot attempts the Habs took and just 29.4% of the shot attempts they allowed, and the Habs would have been a respectable 52.9%. Less dominant, good for 12th in the league.

The way he plays offence means that he's prone to the odd gaffe, but you'd rather have a player handle the puck and make the occasional mistake than a player that simply doesn't know how to handle it. Subban should be a lock for Team Canada and his defensive deficiencies are greatly, greatly overstated.

Cam Charron is a BC hockey fan that writes about hockey on many different websites including this one.

The point of the article is well taken, but the alarming thing for me there is that they have Marc Edouard Vlasic and Marc Staal ranked ahead of Dan Hamhuis among left handed defensemen. Particularly with Hamhuis's international experience playing for Canada at the worlds.

Last Olympics, and you can watch the gold medal game on youtube if you don't believe me, Mike Babcock was pretty adamantine about playing defensemen on their natural sides. I suspect he'll want to do that again this go-round unless the play of some of those RHD makes it impossible.

Basically, then, your question is, which RHD is Subban going to slot in for among the ones TSN has starting? He's certainly not going to supplant Doughty or Weber. Pietrangelo? Well, I see a strong argument for preferring AP not just because he's really freaking good, but because you can send him out there with Bouwmeester, who he plays with regularly.